EDC 586 Class Reflection: (Submitted by Diana Psyras)
In the article by Matthew H. Bowker, Teaching Students to Ask Questions Instead of Answering Them, the author describes his teaching method of asking students to formulate questions based on their reading assignments. This type of assignment encourages students to infer, to construct meaning, and to connect information in order to determine meaning and to formulate questions, which lead to additional questions. The net result is that students develop a habit of questioning what they read and thinking independently.
Matthew Bowker stresses the importance of students learning to critically evaluate what they see and hear in order to become successful consumers and producers of digital media. I agree that they should be taught to question everything that they consume. Is the source accurate and reliable? Is there a bias within the message or the author’s intent? Is the information useful for providing answers for a compelling question? If the student’s goal is to produce, then how much information is enough and how does a student organize it and deliver it digitally? The questions help students to reinvent their vision of the world, and their place in it, how people and things relate to one-another, and how things work (personal schemas.) I plan to incorporate what the author tells his students, “We start with answers and end up with questions.” I would like my students to develop their own questions engaging in “purposeful inquiry” when approaching digital information for consumption and production. An example of this could be to design a lesson where third to fifth grade students are given the choice of a country that they think they might want to visit. The teacher-generated prompt would be, “What country would you like to visit and why?” They would be encouraged to research their country on the Web and then to explain to the class what they wanted to know about the country and why they wanted to visit (their essential questions), how and where to find their information, and why they chose to present it in the digital format and sequence of their choice. What kind of picture are they trying to paint of their country for their peer audience? I also agree with the author when he says that questions lead to realization of possibilities. Possibilities lead to creativity and to more questioning.
After reading Grant Wiggin’s Article entitled, “On Genuine vs. Bogus Inquiry - Using EQs Properly,” I decided to plan to teach a lesson on essential questions at the beginning of the school year, giving examples using Storify. I will also plan to incorporate at least one EQ into all of my lessons to help my students improve their ability to synthesize, question, comment, and report on what they read. Grant Wiggins gives excellent guidance on how to structure lessons so that students focus on the essential question. He suggests instructing students to take notes on the essential questions, to discuss the essential question in small groups and as a class, to talk about anything that was confusing in the reading assignment, and then individually to write a response to the essential question. I thought that this was an excellent format for a lesson and will be especially useful in implementing the new Common Core ELA standards that focus on being able to recognize the most important points in descriptive, informative, persuasive, and nonfiction texts and articles. It is essential that students be able to remember to read with the EQs in mind. I have included the author’s EQ definition and recommended process for implementing it below for personal reference.
A Four-Phase Process for Implementing Essential Questions
Phase
Goal
▪ Introduce a question designed to cause inquiry.
Ensure that the EQ is thought-provoking, relevant to both students and the current unit/course content, and explorable via a text/research project/lab/problem/issue/simulation in which the question comes to life.
▪ Elicit varied responses and question those responses.
Use questioning techniques and protocols as necessary to elicit the widest possible array of different plausible, yet imperfect answers to the question. Also, probe the original question in light of the different takes on it that are implied in the varied student answers and due to inherent ambiguity in the words of the question.
▪ Introduce and explore new perspective(s)
Bring new text/data/phenomena to the inquiry, designed to deliberately extend inquiry and/or call into question tentative conclusions reached thus far. Elicit and compare new answers to previous answers, looking for possible connections and inconsistencies to probe.
▪ Reach tentative closure.
Ask students to generalize their findings, new insights, and remaining (and/or newly raised) questions about both content and process.
A good Essential Question: 1) is open-ended; i.e., it typically will not have a single, final, and correct answer. 2) is thought-provoking and intellectually engaging, meant to spark discussion and debate. 3) calls for high-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, prediction. It cannot be effectively answered by recall alone. 4) points toward important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines. 5) raisesadditional questions and sparks further inquiry. 6) requires support and justification, not just an answer. 7) recurs over time; i.e., the question can and should bere-visited again and again. Hiller A. Spires, Lisa G. Hervey, Gwynn Morris, and Catherine Stelpflug give excellent suggestions for engaging students in learning by having students create their own videos. In their article, “Energizing Project-Based Inquiry: Middle Grade Students Read, Write, and Create Videos,” the authors recommend that teachers explicitly model how to locate and synthesize Web-based information from multiple sources across the entire curriculum. Students then create and present their digital projects, giving them new exciting “multi-modal” ways to develop “multiliteracies” and to share what they have learned with their peers and their teacher. Special needs students often require multiple exposures to information and have a variety of learning style preferences. Sound, text, graphics, gestural movement and special components of creating videos cover these different learning styles. I agree with the author’s when they talk about the benefits of giving students a new way to express what they have learned. My students are used to watching short introductory videos on subjects across the curriculum. I will plan to take this one exciting step further by having them create their own Cinéma Veritéen videos. Get ready for multiliteracies project-based learning! Cinéma Veritéen included the following five-phase process:
ask a compelling question 2. gather and analyze information 3. creatively synthesize information 4. critically evaluate and revise 5. publish, share, and act
Julie Coiro, in her article entitled, “Talking About Reading as Thinking: Modeling the Hidden Complexities of Online Reading Comprehension,” (2011), modeling the “think-aloud” strategies will be very helpful for my special needs students who struggle with reading comprehension with a single text to make sense of information from multiple online sources. Planning, problem solving, and metacognitive awareness…I plan to implement the following four-stage explicit think-aloud instructional model in my classroom across the curriculum:
Approach online reading tasks with a purpose, anticipate challenges, and make a flexible plan.
Give students strategies to determine which ideas and information is important to their purpose, while considering author credentials and bias, and to check on information that appears suspect.
Help students stop to check to make sure that reread and refocus when they do not understand something that they have read or are off purpose (topic).
Have students combine, reading, writing, and reflection, to summarize important ideas, ask questions, and to make connections, and to add their own ideas when responding to a key question.
The author also highlights the importance of using authentic life-like standards-based practice situations/problems and online information challenges and are directed to high-interest online texts to encourage generalization of the above online reading skills. The overall goal is to model reading efficiently and critically so that students will comprehend that there are multiple points of view that they need to synthesize and evaluate. I plan to incorporate the following model for online reading comprehension instruction into my lessons: (see http://sites.google.com/site/tiponline thinkaloudlessons/lesson-template for a lesson template).
Modeling(Teacher models effective Web site navigation, analysis, & response to online text.)
Guided Practice (with gradual release of responsibility to the students)
Reflection (Group discusses solutions to online comprehension challenges.)
In Michael Gaffney’s article, “Enhancing Teachers’ Take-up of Digital Content: Factors and Design Principles in Technology Adoption,” he references meta-analysis findings on what criteria teachers use when deciding whether to adopt a digital technology as part of their curriculum: Compatibility with existing methods and techniques, and relative advantage in comparison with these established methods and techniques (Rogers 1962). Article Summary:
On the basis of these findings, the following design principles should be considered in supporting teachers to embed digital curriculum resources into their pedagogical practice. These are categorized in terms of the type of factors to which they most closely apply: • relevance of the digital curriculum resources • appropriateness of the technological tools to deliver them • capability of teachers to use them • motivation and interest of students to learn with them • culture of schools to institutionalize their use • political will and capacity of governments and educational authorities to develop policy to promote and monitor their use • importance of education systems developing awareness and shared understanding about the value of digital content • the means by which the actions of governments, education authorities, schools, teachers and students are aligned and integrated through the implementation process to increase teacher use of such resources for the benefit of students.
I work in a high socioeconomic district that offers tremendous extra-curricular activities, which require auxiliary hours from teachers who are working overtime to incorporate new Common Core state curriculum required standards. When asked to pilot new technologies, few step forward. The article made me think about how I would like to see district-wide development of “plug and play” technology resources to support the Common Core. For example, one desktop image with licensed software and links to the cloud for grades K-2, one for grades 3-5, one for middle school, and another for high school, so that teachers do not have to research, finance from limited classroom funds, and install their own tool sets on classroom PCs, Macs, and iPads. The district could also provide hardware platforms with current operating systems to support the applications and links to the cloud, as well as teacher technology training. I think the way to plant the seed for change is to become an early adopter of digital technologies by creating an efficient, cost-effective image for my students to use, track their progress prior to using the tools and throughout the year while using the tools, and then share our results with my administrator, other teachers, and our district office management. This would support the author’s research findings that as technology evolves and becomes more powerful and important to learn to use the use of the technology tools needs to be “pedagogically sound and strategically planned.”
Finding the Essential Question Lesson Plan:
Essential Question: What is the EQ? How do I find it when reading?
YOUR NAME: Diana Psyras
Learners: Special Needs students grades 3-5
Self: Diana Psyras, Special Education Day Class Teacher
Context: ELA
Community: Rm. 13 SDC Students
PURPOSE
(Learning Objectives): Students will be able to define and to give an example of an EQ from a nonfiction reading assignment.
Standards: English Language Arts Standards CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.2 Determine the main idea of a text; recount the key details and explain how they support the main idea.
Use your purpose, content, and pedagogical strategies to inform the design of your lesson:
Lesson #2 from our Endangered Species Unit: What is a habitat? What makes a good habitat for an animal?
TASK/ACTIVITY (includes compelling question and possible scenario): What is an essential question? How do I find it when I read?
Define EQ
Explain & model using the EQ when reading and taking notes.
Pose EQs: What is a habitat? (It is the environment where an animal lives.) What makes a good habitat for an animal? Create a K-W-L chart.
Ask students to answer this question by describing their own habitat and what is positive about it for them.
CONTENT/TEXTS:
Students choose their favorite endangered species and research that animal’s natural habitat using the Goorulearning link and list of Websites from Lesson #1 (Goorulearning.org http://bit.ly/11TL2zL), library books, encyclopedia, etc.
Write interview questions and interview a science teacher or librarian from our school, a parent, or an expert scientist (can Skype or email) to determine what makes a good environment for their chosen endangered animal (e.g., food and water sources, temperature, shelter, etc.)
ASSESSMENTS:
Students can give an oral report using photos and videos from the Web, can create an Animoto video, or can use Storify to answer the EQ in front of the class.
Students will present their project to their parents for homework.
Students will post their project in Evernote (or another personal e-portfolio)
CONTENT:
Topics: EQ: What is a habitat? What makes a good habitat for an endangered animal?
library books - students will search for texts using library online catalog
encyclopedias
Scholastic News
Time for Kids
PEDAGOGY:
Instructional Strategies: Teacher will model asking the EQ throughout the project. Students will practice asking the EQ when doing each assignment task.
Work Products: Formal: student reports, Animoto, Storify presentations
How Measure?: Student/teacher discussions and final projects where students are able to state the EQ and present facts to support their findings. ___ Questions 1-7:
Describe some of the digital literacies that you learned about this week. What did you know about these topics before the week began and how have this week’s experiences contributed to your understanding of these digital literacies? Douglas Rushkoff gave us a critical view of some of the ways that digital technology can skew our way of understanding our real versus virtual alternatives to our present moment (overwinding), the effects of lack of actual historical knowledge to explain true cause and effect versus random sound bites (narrative collapse), and the attention demands on our cognitive abilities that pull between the present and our digital devices (digiprhenia). I can see the importance of student understanding these concepts in terms of using digital technologies to support versus drive them and distract them. The concept of digital literacy as a means of creating a school project or improving student comprehension across the curriculum is very exciting! I was very glad to discover tools that my students and I can use to help them organize their workflow and to access it when needed. Now that you’ve had this professional development experience, how are you defining “digital literacy?” I think that digital literacy is more than just the ability to synthesize, compare/contrast, and critically evaluate what a student reads, hears, or sees on a variety of Web sites. Digital literacy empowers our students to formulate and understand essential questions and to create multisensory representations of what they have learned and want to share with others.
What is your personal perspective on digital literacy and how has your definition changed or evolved this week? My personal definition of digital literacy has broadened to include the ability of a student to evaluate different sources and to combine information in that way that has meaning to them. I feel very strongly that my students will only gain by becoming digitally literate, by improving their comprehension and metacognitive skills, and by using all of their senses to learn. Where possible, make specific connections to readings, conversations, presentations, or activities that were especially important to the evolution of your definition of digital literacy. I really learned a good deal about the importance of using digital literacy to enhance our lives verses reducing our narratives to sound bites nor explain cause and effect relationships correctly. In the review of Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Present Shock, the reviewer calls attention to the term, Digiphrenia, which reflects how technology enables us to be in two places at once. Douglas Rushkoff uses the example of a teen at a party texting to see if there is another better party instead of simply enjoying and being fully engaged at the party she is attending. It seems as though the idea of a bigger, better party experience out there in the virtual ether can be more enticing than the here and now. Douglas Rushkoff and his reviewer make the noteworthy point of the importance of reminding our students to be mentally present in the classroom and in their lives.
On the other hand, we can look at the positive side of this scenario and tempt our students with assignments that digitally transport them out of their seats and into “real world” places, times, cultures, and educational scenarios that challenge them. They can digitally “travel” to modern-day China to discover how students their age live and to make compare and contrast with their own lives. They can virtually visit Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa and other great works of art in the Louvre to find out why they are so special and how artists captured human likeness before cameras and cell phones. I would like my students to be able to go to a supermarket website and plan and budget for a Thanksgiving dinner or a Chinese New Year feast. The digital world can be a source of astounding world literacy, beckoning our students to become curious global citizens.
Rushkoff also mourns the loss of narrative as a teaching tool when story lines are compressed or left out altogether, replaced by what the author calls “disjointed moments” that fail to tell a story or reflect true cause and effect. Historical perspective and background are lost when the narrative is lost. In the book, Present Shock, he goes into enlightening detail about the effects of “compressed imagery” with its “gaps, juxtapositions, and discontinuity,” replacing traditional narrative goals. We still need to learn from linear history.
How do digital literacies affect the way you think aboutacademic content? Describe an example of how some specific academic content is affected by changes in the ways we read, write and think with digital media texts, tools & technologies. I see applications for digital literacy across the entire curriculum. Many mild/moderate special needs students have learning preferences, so curriculum presented in a multisensory format, such as a video that incorporates music, graphics, motion, and text is engaging and will appeal to at least one of their learning strengths.
How do digital literacies affect teaching practices? What overarching considerations must teachers give, in general, to the interactions of digital literacies and how to teach? Teachers need to use the appropriate technologies to support Common Core State Standards.Using technology for technology’s sake is not a best practice. Now, focus on your own pedagogical practice. How will your new understanding of digital literacy affect the way you teach? I will plan to use TPACK. Describe an example of how you will differently employ a specific teaching practice in your own context as a result of what you learned this week. Judi Harris and Mark Hoffer discuss the importance of the marriage of technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPACK) in their article, “Instructional Planning Activity Types as Vehicles for Curriculum-Based TPACK Development.” TPACK is critical because it impresses that need to use the appropriate technology, not simply for technology’s sake, but to support standards-based curriculum and to make teaching (how to deliver content) more efficient and effective for students and teachers, while considering student culture and socioeconomic status, as well as school resources and policies. In my classroom, the technology will be both delivery system and organizational tool to give my students access to the scaffolding and multisensory versions of our curriculum that they will eventually access independently at their individual learning rates. TPACK tied to state Common Core Standards will give them learning independence. The dliuri2013 WIKI space will be my go-to resource for these technologies. Key TPACK Planning Concepts (5 Basic Instructional Decisions): • Choosing learning goals • Making practical pedagogical decisions about the nature of the learning experience • Selecting and sequencing appropriate activity types to combine to form the learning experience. Selecting formative and summative assessment strategies that will reveal what and how well students are learning Selecting tools and resources that will best help students to benefit from the learning experience being planned.
During the week, you were introduced to several concerns and promising practices around digital literacy, digital pedagogy, social networking, and student voice that are circulating among communities of educators, librarians, and youth media specialists. From your perspective, what promising practices show the most potential? I like the concept of challenging students to create in order to learn curriculum and to express themselves using tools that electronically scaffold (Animoto & Storify) and organize their work and Web site links (Wiki, Evernote, Google Docs, Symbaloo). Which specific concerns are most pressing? It is very important that students be able to evaluate the validity, accuracy, and bias of online sources/authors and explain the metacognitive process they use to problem solve and to create using digital media. I do not just want them to play with the applications, I want them to general their use in and outside of school to be more organized and to help them to remember and present their ideas effectively. What key takeaways will you champion in your own work setting(s) so that together, you and your colleagues can (a) implement promising practices and (b) address issues of concern? I am looking forward to teaching my students to use the cool tools to create, communicate, organize, and share what they have learned with their peers and their families. My mantra will be that we all can learn, create, collaborate, and communicate using digital literacy (LCCC.)
If you had one more day in the Institute, what would you like to learn more about and why? If I had one more day at the Institute, I would attend some of the cool tools sessions that I missed because they were scheduled at the same time. I would also like to learn more about the fundraising process and sources. How will you leverage your professional learning network and your new digital literacies to explore your remaining questions over the coming year? I will plan to visit the Wiki for the conference often and to reach out to attendees for their opinions and to share ideas other cool sites and applications that support Common Core Standards. I also hope to attend some of the online webinars.
Julie, I embedded some of the reading key take-aways into the questions 1-7. I hope that that will work. Also, my apologies for the font size disparity. The font sizes are consistent in Word, but change when pasted into the Wiki space. Thank you so much for an amazing Digital Literacy 2013 conference. The conference will truly change my second year of teaching and my students' learning in amazing ways! Diana
In the article by Matthew H. Bowker, Teaching Students to Ask Questions Instead of Answering Them, the author describes his teaching method of asking students to formulate questions based on their reading assignments. This type of assignment encourages students to infer, to construct meaning, and to connect information in order to determine meaning and to formulate questions, which lead to additional questions. The net result is that students develop a habit of questioning what they read and thinking independently.
Matthew Bowker stresses the importance of students learning to critically evaluate what they see and hear in order to become successful consumers and producers of digital media. I agree that they should be taught to question everything that they consume. Is the source accurate and reliable? Is there a bias within the message or the author’s intent? Is the information useful for providing answers for a compelling question? If the student’s goal is to produce, then how much information is enough and how does a student organize it and deliver it digitally? The questions help students to reinvent their vision of the world, and their place in it, how people and things relate to one-another, and how things work (personal schemas.) I plan to incorporate what the author tells his students, “We start with answers and end up with questions.” I would like my students to develop their own questions engaging in “purposeful inquiry” when approaching digital information for consumption and production. An example of this could be to design a lesson where third to fifth grade students are given the choice of a country that they think they might want to visit. The teacher-generated prompt would be, “What country would you like to visit and why?” They would be encouraged to research their country on the Web and then to explain to the class what they wanted to know about the country and why they wanted to visit (their essential questions), how and where to find their information, and why they chose to present it in the digital format and sequence of their choice. What kind of picture are they trying to paint of their country for their peer audience? I also agree with the author when he says that questions lead to realization of possibilities. Possibilities lead to creativity and to more questioning.
After reading Grant Wiggin’s Article entitled, “On Genuine vs. Bogus Inquiry - Using EQs Properly,” I decided to plan to teach a lesson on essential questions at the beginning of the school year, giving examples using Storify. I will also plan to incorporate at least one EQ into all of my lessons to help my students improve their ability to synthesize, question, comment, and report on what they read. Grant Wiggins gives excellent guidance on how to structure lessons so that students focus on the essential question. He suggests instructing students to take notes on the essential questions, to discuss the essential question in small groups and as a class, to talk about anything that was confusing in the reading assignment, and then individually to write a response to the essential question. I thought that this was an excellent format for a lesson and will be especially useful in implementing the new Common Core ELA standards that focus on being able to recognize the most important points in descriptive, informative, persuasive, and nonfiction texts and articles. It is essential that students be able to remember to read with the EQs in mind. I have included the author’s EQ definition and recommended process for implementing it below for personal reference.
A Four-Phase Process for Implementing Essential Questions
A good Essential Question:
1) is open-ended; i.e., it typically will not have a single, final, and correct answer.
2) is thought-provoking and intellectually engaging, meant to spark discussion and debate.
3) calls for high-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, prediction. It cannot be effectively answered by recall alone.
4) points toward important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines.
5) raises additional questions and sparks further inquiry.
6) requires support and justification, not just an answer.
7) recurs over time; i.e., the question can and should bere-visited again and again.
Hiller A. Spires, Lisa G. Hervey, Gwynn Morris, and Catherine Stelpflug give excellent suggestions for engaging students in learning by having students create their own videos. In their article, “Energizing Project-Based Inquiry: Middle Grade Students Read, Write, and Create Videos,” the authors recommend that teachers explicitly model how to locate and synthesize Web-based information from multiple sources across the entire curriculum. Students then create and present their digital projects, giving them new exciting “multi-modal” ways to develop “multiliteracies” and to share what they have learned with their peers and their teacher. Special needs students often require multiple exposures to information and have a variety of learning style preferences. Sound, text, graphics, gestural movement and special components of creating videos cover these different learning styles. I agree with the author’s when they talk about the benefits of giving students a new way to express what they have learned. My students are used to watching short introductory videos on subjects across the curriculum. I will plan to take this one exciting step further by having them create their own Cinéma Veritéen videos. Get ready for multiliteracies project-based learning!
Cinéma Veritéen included the following five-phase process:
Julie Coiro, in her article entitled, “Talking About Reading as Thinking: Modeling the Hidden Complexities of Online Reading Comprehension,” (2011), modeling the “think-aloud” strategies will be very helpful for my special needs students who struggle with reading comprehension with a single text to make sense of information from multiple online sources. Planning, problem solving, and metacognitive awareness…I plan to implement the following four-stage explicit think-aloud instructional model in my classroom across the curriculum:
- Approach online reading tasks with a purpose, anticipate challenges, and make a flexible plan.
- Give students strategies to determine which ideas and information is important to their purpose, while considering author credentials and bias, and to check on information that appears suspect.
- Help students stop to check to make sure that reread and refocus when they do not understand something that they have read or are off purpose (topic).
- Have students combine, reading, writing, and reflection, to summarize important ideas, ask questions, and to make connections, and to add their own ideas when responding to a key question.
The author also highlights the importance of using authentic life-like standards-based practice situations/problems and online information challenges and are directed to high-interest online texts to encourage generalization of the above online reading skills. The overall goal is to model reading efficiently and critically so that students will comprehend that there are multiple points of view that they need to synthesize and evaluate. I plan to incorporate the following model for online reading comprehension instruction into my lessons:(see http://sites.google.com/site/tiponline thinkaloudlessons/lesson-template for a lesson template).
In Michael Gaffney’s article, “Enhancing Teachers’ Take-up of Digital Content: Factors and
Design Principles in Technology Adoption,” he references meta-analysis findings on what criteria teachers use when deciding whether to adopt a digital technology as part of their curriculum:
Compatibility with existing methods and techniques, and relative advantage in comparison with these established methods and techniques (Rogers 1962).
Article Summary:
On the basis of these findings, the following design principles should be considered in supporting teachers to embed digital curriculum resources into their pedagogical practice. These are categorized in terms of the type of factors to which they most closely apply:
• relevance of the digital curriculum resources • appropriateness of the technological tools to
deliver them • capability of teachers to use them • motivation and interest of students to learn
with them • culture of schools to institutionalize their use • political will and capacity of governments and educational authorities to develop policy to promote and monitor their use • importance of education systems developing awareness and shared understanding about the
value of digital content • the means by which the actions of governments, education authorities, schools, teachers and students are aligned and integrated through the implementation process to increase teacher use of such resources for the benefit of students.
I work in a high socioeconomic district that offers tremendous extra-curricular activities, which require auxiliary hours from teachers who are working overtime to incorporate new Common Core state curriculum required standards. When asked to pilot new technologies, few step forward. The article made me think about how I would like to see district-wide development of “plug and play” technology resources to support the Common Core. For example, one desktop image with licensed software and links to the cloud for grades K-2, one for grades 3-5, one for middle school, and another for high school, so that teachers do not have to research, finance from limited classroom funds, and install their own tool sets on classroom PCs, Macs, and iPads. The district could also provide hardware platforms with current operating systems to support the applications and links to the cloud, as well as teacher technology training. I think the way to plant the seed for change is to become an early adopter of digital technologies by creating an efficient, cost-effective image for my students to use, track their progress prior to using the tools and throughout the year while using the tools, and then share our results with my administrator, other teachers, and our district office management. This would support the author’s research findings that as technology evolves and becomes more powerful and important to learn to use the use of the technology tools needs to be “pedagogically sound and strategically planned.”
Finding the Essential Question Lesson Plan:
Essential Question: What is the EQ? How do I find it when reading?
YOUR NAME: Diana Psyras
Learners: Special Needs students grades 3-5
Self: Diana Psyras, Special Education Day Class Teacher
Context: ELA
Community: Rm. 13 SDC Students
PURPOSE
(Learning Objectives): Students will be able to define and to give an example of an EQ from a nonfiction reading assignment.
Standards: English Language Arts Standards
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.2 Determine the main idea of a text; recount the key details and explain how they support the main idea.
Use your purpose, content, and pedagogical strategies to inform the design of your lesson:
Lesson #2 from our Endangered Species Unit:
What is a habitat? What makes a good habitat for an animal?
TASK/ACTIVITY (includes compelling question and possible scenario):
What is an essential question? How do I find it when I read?
CONTENT/TEXTS:
ASSESSMENTS:
CONTENT:
Topics: EQ: What is a habitat? What makes a good habitat for an endangered animal?
- Online Texts: Goorulearning.org http://bit.ly/11TL2zL)
- **//Scholastic News//: //Endangered Species//**teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/endangered_species/
- World Wild Life Federation Web Site:
http://worldwildlife.org/speciesPrinted Text:
PEDAGOGY:
Instructional Strategies: Teacher will model asking the EQ throughout the project. Students will practice asking the EQ when doing each assignment task.
Tools: iMacs, Elmo projector, Goorulearning, Storify, Animoto,
Assessment Tools: Informal: student/peer/teacher discussions
Formal: student reports, Animoto, Storify presentations
Work Products: Formal: student reports, Animoto, Storify presentations
How Measure?: Student/teacher discussions and final projects where students are able to state the EQ and present facts to support their findings.
___
Questions 1-7:
Describe some of the digital literacies that you learned about this week. What did you know about these topics before the week began and how have this week’s experiences contributed to your understanding of these digital literacies? Douglas Rushkoff gave us a critical view of some of the ways that digital technology can skew our way of understanding our real versus virtual alternatives to our present moment (overwinding), the effects of lack of actual historical knowledge to explain true cause and effect versus random sound bites (narrative collapse), and the attention demands on our cognitive abilities that pull between the present and our digital devices (digiprhenia). I can see the importance of student understanding these concepts in terms of using digital technologies to support versus drive them and distract them. The concept of digital literacy as a means of creating a school project or improving student comprehension across the curriculum is very exciting! I was very glad to discover tools that my students and I can use to help them organize their workflow and to access it when needed.
Now that you’ve had this professional development experience, how are you defining “digital literacy?” I think that digital literacy is more than just the ability to synthesize, compare/contrast, and critically evaluate what a student reads, hears, or sees on a variety of Web sites. Digital literacy empowers our students to formulate and understand essential questions and to create multisensory representations of what they have learned and want to share with others.
What is your personal perspective on digital literacy and how has your definition changed or evolved this week? My personal definition of digital literacy has broadened to include the ability of a student to evaluate different sources and to combine information in that way that has meaning to them. I feel very strongly that my students will only gain by becoming digitally literate, by improving their comprehension and metacognitive skills, and by using all of their senses to learn. Where possible, make specific connections to readings, conversations, presentations, or activities that were especially important to the evolution of your definition of digital literacy. I really learned a good deal about the importance of using digital literacy to enhance our lives verses reducing our narratives to sound bites nor explain cause and effect relationships correctly. In the review of Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Present Shock, the reviewer calls attention to the term, Digiphrenia, which reflects how technology enables us to be in two places at once. Douglas Rushkoff uses the example of a teen at a party texting to see if there is another better party instead of simply enjoying and being fully engaged at the party she is attending. It seems as though the idea of a bigger, better party experience out there in the virtual ether can be more enticing than the here and now. Douglas Rushkoff and his reviewer make the noteworthy point of the importance of reminding our students to be mentally present in the classroom and in their lives.
On the other hand, we can look at the positive side of this scenario and tempt our students with assignments that digitally transport them out of their seats and into “real world” places, times, cultures, and educational scenarios that challenge them. They can digitally “travel” to modern-day China to discover how students their age live and to make compare and contrast with their own lives. They can virtually visit Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa and other great works of art in the Louvre to find out why they are so special and how artists captured human likeness before cameras and cell phones. I would like my students to be able to go to a supermarket website and plan and budget for a Thanksgiving dinner or a Chinese New Year feast. The digital world can be a source of astounding world literacy, beckoning our students to become curious global citizens.
Rushkoff also mourns the loss of narrative as a teaching tool when story lines are compressed or left out altogether, replaced by what the author calls “disjointed moments” that fail to tell a story or reflect true cause and effect. Historical perspective and background are lost when the narrative is lost. In the book, Present Shock, he goes into enlightening detail about the effects of “compressed imagery” with its “gaps, juxtapositions, and discontinuity,” replacing traditional narrative goals. We still need to learn from linear history.
How do digital literacies affect the way you think about academic content? Describe an example of how some specific academic content is affected by changes in the ways we read, write and think with digital media texts, tools & technologies. I see applications for digital literacy across the entire curriculum. Many mild/moderate special needs students have learning preferences, so curriculum presented in a multisensory format, such as a video that incorporates music, graphics, motion, and text is engaging and will appeal to at least one of their learning strengths.
How do digital literacies affect teaching practices? What overarching considerations must teachers give, in general, to the interactions of digital literacies and how to teach? Teachers need to use the appropriate technologies to support Common Core State Standards.Using technology for technology’s sake is not a best practice. Now, focus on your own pedagogical practice. How will your new understanding of digital literacy affect the way you teach? I will plan to use TPACK. Describe an example of how you will differently employ a specific teaching practice in your own context as a result of what you learned this week.
Judi Harris and Mark Hoffer discuss the importance of the marriage of technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPACK) in their article, “Instructional Planning Activity Types as Vehicles for Curriculum-Based TPACK Development.” TPACK is critical because it impresses that need to use the appropriate technology, not simply for technology’s sake, but to support standards-based curriculum and to make teaching (how to deliver content) more efficient and effective for students and teachers, while considering student culture and socioeconomic status, as well as school resources and policies. In my classroom, the technology will be both delivery system and organizational tool to give my students access to the scaffolding and multisensory versions of our curriculum that they will eventually access independently at their individual learning rates. TPACK tied to state Common Core Standards will give them learning independence. The dliuri2013 WIKI space will be my go-to resource for these technologies.
Key TPACK Planning Concepts (5 Basic Instructional Decisions):
• Choosing learning goals
• Making practical pedagogical decisions about the nature of the learning experience
• Selecting and sequencing appropriate activity types to combine to form the learning experience. Selecting formative and summative assessment strategies that will reveal what and how well students are learning
Selecting tools and resources that will best help students to benefit from the learning experience being planned.
During the week, you were introduced to several concerns and promising practices around digital literacy, digital pedagogy, social networking, and student voice that are circulating among communities of educators, librarians, and youth media specialists. From your perspective, what promising practices show the most potential? I like the concept of challenging students to create in order to learn curriculum and to express themselves using tools that electronically scaffold (Animoto & Storify) and organize their work and Web site links (Wiki, Evernote, Google Docs, Symbaloo). Which specific concerns are most pressing? It is very important that students be able to evaluate the validity, accuracy, and bias of online sources/authors and explain the metacognitive process they use to problem solve and to create using digital media. I do not just want them to play with the applications, I want them to general their use in and outside of school to be more organized and to help them to remember and present their ideas effectively. What key takeaways will you champion in your own work setting(s) so that together, you and your colleagues can (a) implement promising practices and (b) address issues of concern? I am looking forward to teaching my students to use the cool tools to create, communicate, organize, and share what they have learned with their peers and their families. My mantra will be that we all can learn, create, collaborate, and communicate using digital literacy (LCCC.)
If you had one more day in the Institute, what would you like to learn more about and why? If I had one more day at the Institute, I would attend some of the cool tools sessions that I missed because they were scheduled at the same time. I would also like to learn more about the fundraising process and sources.
How will you leverage your professional learning network and your new digital literacies to explore your remaining questions over the coming year? I will plan to visit the Wiki for the conference often and to reach out to attendees for their opinions and to share ideas other cool sites and applications that support Common Core Standards. I also hope to attend some of the online webinars.
Julie,
I embedded some of the reading key take-aways into the questions 1-7. I hope that that will work. Also, my apologies for the font size disparity. The font sizes are consistent in Word, but change when pasted into the Wiki space. Thank you so much for an amazing Digital Literacy 2013 conference. The conference will truly change my second year of teaching and my students' learning in amazing ways!
Diana